The weather of who we are

Mark Tredddinick is a poet who lives in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales and has written a book called Australia's Wild Weather. He talks about what weather means to us and how it affects our daily lives.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Well, it’s been a week for weather. A climate report released on Monday warning that extremes, heat and flood, may be in the offing, depending on where you live. It’s also been a week for literature and words, with the Sydney Writer’s Festival underway. So, let’s combine the two and have a poet talk weather. Mark Treddinick is a poet and lives in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. His latest book is Australia’s Wild Weather. Mark.

Mark Tredinnick: Don’t start with the weather, Elmore Leonard’s first rule of writing which I’m breaking here from start to finish.

Everything starts with the weather so why wouldn’t a writer. Why wouldn’t we all? And we often do. How’s the weather over there? Hot enough for you? Have you ever seen so much rain? Though these days most of us spend most of our lives inside, 93% to be precise, still we live inside the weather. There’s no escaping it, it’s how the world speaks to us. It tempers and colours all our days and nights, it clothes us, it decorates and articulates the places where we live.

Start thinking about the weather and you soon find yourself in outer space; the sun’s radiation, the orbit of the earth around our star, the sun; the daily rotation of the planet, the tilt of this orb in its daily spinning; the location of our planet just near enough to and yet far enough from the sun to kick-start life and keep it going; to let the whole miraculous system work and keep on working within the insulation of the atmosphere.

For weather is how our planet behaves in space and how the atmosphere curdles and gyres and rotates around it, weather is intergalactic and it’s global. But think about the weather another way and you are right here, and what the weather means is how things look and feel outside your window. For weather is also local, it’s how the sky behaves when it turns up at your place; the distinctiveness of the light at dawn, the way the wind picks up from the west in the afternoons, the species and colour of clouds that inhabit this valley with you. The heaviness of the rain that falls out of winter storm fronts or dumps from January southerlies, or the way rain rarely falls this side of the mountain, the size of the hail in April downpours, the particular shade of green the sky turns above the bay ahead of a tropical storm in late November. The speed with which the ground fog comes up the paddocks from the flood plain some nights in early winter, the blueness of the light in June over the harbour, the characteristic heaviness of the frost in the east-facing lawns in July, the weight of the pre-Christmas winds.

There is always weather to report and there will be weather long after there are any of us around to report it. Weather is the oldest story in the world, one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself and affecting us, whether we like it or not. Clouds, those thought bubbles of the atmosphere, those oracular utterances of the sky, those prophesies, those poems may have taught us to think, especially higher thoughts, to speak our mind and to change it.

And still we’re at it, this most ancient discourse, for the weather never lets up and it continues to affect the way we experience life and our lives on earth.

These days weather talk is bigger and more abstract for although we are, most of us, removed from it living most of our lives under cover, we can read the weather of the entire planet on our laptops and television screens. Now more than ever everyone else’s weather is our own. Weather talk is big talk now, and it’s political talk; it is econometric discourse because the weather is changing around us and changing faster perhaps than it’s ever changed before; though it’s hard to tell with weather, its patterns are long and our memories are short, our data inexact and shallow. It looks like long established weather norms are changing and not in our favour and it looks, so the climate change hypothesis goes, as if we may have caused it, changing the chemistry and behaviour of the atmosphere we conduct our lives inside. By burning too much fuel, in part, to defy and transcend the weather, to stay too warm, to stay too cool, to prosper everywhere, all the time, regardless of the weather. Weather was always small talk. Now it’s become most of the news.

The weather is the stage set on which we enact the drama of our lives. We breathe it in, we see embodied in it our fears and desires, it falls on our head and we’d better take care of it; our lives are in its hands.

The weather of who I am.

I go the way the weather goes, though not always in sync; eddies of energy rise and fall in me, travel me in a ceaseless, undulant, sometimes turbid and recursive circuit. The world that is my body is travelled by weather. We are creatures made largely like the planet of water; we are physical beings under the sun, moving in space, small wildernesses of microbes and energies and all the rest of it. We are made of the same atoms the world, the whole universe is made of, we are creatures adapted profoundly to the earth in its manifestations. So it should not surprise us that we have weather too, and are, even in these air-conditioned days affected by changes of mood of the weather of the larger world, of air pressure and light, or wind and rain and cloud. Sometimes the weather going on inside yourself is the same weather going on inside your habitat; sometimes your weather rises out of memory or desire or fear. Each of us is a small world trafficked by weather, emotional and intellectual and physical. And perhaps how we feel is just how who we are responds to the eddies of energy, internal and external that course us the highs and lows. Certainly this is how my life goes, I harbour weather, I am made of it. And this helps me understand the world and all the weather it suffers, how the world and all of us within it are weathered without end.

The weather of who we are.

We are a sclerophyll people, adapted in our speech and manners, in our worldview, to the manifold variations on a theme of dryness that are the prevailing weather of the continent.

We are a conforming, decent people, good at getting things done – on the battlefield, the playing field, the farm, the mine site, the mall, at home. We’re good at civility and embarrassed by ceremony, though good at putting on a do; we’re not much given to introspection, to political histrionics, revolutions, bills of rights, that sort of thing. We’re rhetorically awkward, suspicious of large gestures unless they’re commercial, we’re dedicated, it is said, to a fair go in particular for ourselves. We’re suspicious of the foreign and the new but we tend to come around. We don’t like to look far into the future as if it were the weather, another cyclone on the horizon, another flood coming downstream, another fire running up the ridge. Perhaps the difficulty of many of our landscapes and the temperate recalcitrance of much of our weather have taught us to be pragmatic to a fault.

In truth, most of our history happens between disasters, not in them; most of who we are lies between the droughts, and fires and flooding rains. We are a stable people on a stable continent whose weather is not, in fact, uncommonly wild and perhaps we tell ourselves stories of military and meteorological disaster narrowly and bravely survived to reassure ourselves we’re real, that we have ticker and pluck, that we’re tough.

This is to overlook of course the long savage dispossession of the first peoples by the settlers, but this has been a part of our history that, until recently, the nation has chosen to ignore. A history of surviving savage weather is a nobler sort of history to own.

In the sunburnt country firestorms and flooding rains and 10 year droughts and cyclones are our myths of identity. Which is not say we get no grief from nature, it’s just to note how much of ourselves we find and how much of our natural and national history we tell in calamities and the doggedness of our spirit in the face of them.

But we are not more prone to natural disasters than the international average. There are hotter places, stormier, though there are none, it has to be admitted, drier. It doesn’t get dangerously cold; there are no ice storms or blizzards (not unless we include our territories on that driest continent on earth, the Antarctic). We get dust storms and we get more than enough cyclones, but we don’t get many tornados, the most destructive force on the planet. We have no equivalent of America’s tornado alley. We do fire as well as anyone and we’ll do it bigger and more often as the atmosphere warms. Drought is our great affliction and in the years ahead water, the scarcity of rivers in the places where most of us live and farm, our profligacy with it, the drying of the climate, is our area of national vulnerability.

Between downpours and conflagrations though, we get about the greater part of who we are, we make history, most of it quiet in mild weather. But we tell ourselves in fires and floods, we find ourselves in drought. We think of ourselves as a people who know how to pick up the pieces when the floodwaters ease and the fires are dowsed, when the cyclone has petered out. And so we are, and so the national memory is crowded with images of the damage the weather often enough wreaks and how bravely we bear it and get on. And it looks like we’re going to get plenty of opportunities to keep proving it in the years ahead.

The weather: an intimate essay.

When I walked to the river at dusk yesterday there was no wind anywhere in the valley. Walking across the paddock was like swimming in the shallows, warm air pooled here and there, nothing much stirred anywhere. At the river a pair of masked lapwings, probably nesting, circled me and looped out over the river where it bends kek-kek-kekking warning me off. Then some weather started up as if the cyclonic circling of the birds had conjured it. The eucalypts on the scarp across the water began to weave and sway and roar in the wind that was happening nowhere else along the river. They kept at it, howling down the lapwings. The trees seemed to be articulating some kind of a downdraft, a narrowly adapted katabatic breeze perhaps rushing off the ridge as the valley cooled. But why here? And why only here? I don’t understand what I witnessed but this was weather, which is sometimes very small, shaped by and native to a place. Later, sitting at my desk I heard the wind racing down off the ridge in the dark and then I heard the rain clattering the roof. The larger weather perhaps, the smaller weather had foretold, coming to tell me who I am.

Living under the influence of the sky.

Weather joins us to everyone and everywhere else but in its local adaptations it also shapes, changes and defines us. We are who we are, indirectly and directly because of the weather we lead our lives in. How we behave, even how we speak is how we adapt to the weather, Australian weather makes us Australian; Pilbara weather, Pilbaran; Tasmanian weather Tasmanian, it’s a large part of it anyway. But weather is regional and global too. We share our cold fronts with New Zealand and Asia shares her monsoons with us. El Nino and La Nina link us to the fates of South Americans and we all share global warming, unevenly though its effects may be distributed.

More personally life lived under the influence of weather, mindful of it, as long as one survives that weather, is a life more fully lived. The days in which I am aware of what’s going on in the sky, which way the wind blows, what species of clouds came by, are days that feel more lived in, in which my life feels more ample. It helps if the weather is bright, or on the other hand wild; it helps if your hat will stay on your head, or your hair for that matter. But it’s the observance, not the value you put on what you observe, that counts. It’s a way of dying as the Buddhists say, to one’s self, one’s mere self and opening to the world, it’s a bigger kind of life, humbler, older, longer. Who you are is so much bigger than what your body encloses and how your society wants to define you. You’re no longer a taxpayer, a consumer, a New South Welshman. You’re a citizen of the real world again, a part of a place. You’re a piece with the weather, a piece of the weather even.

Robyn Williams: As we all are, unless we live underground. Mark Treddinick’s is called Australia’s Wild Weather and it’s full of ravishing pictures and is published by the National Library of Australia. He’s a poet.